The Success of Movies at the Oscars, Box Office, and Reviews

By: Anvesha Dutta (Project Lead), Amelie Ionescu, Casey Truong, Darren Sohn, Prateik Sinha

11 min readMar 28, 2022

Introduction:

According to IMDB, about 2,577 movies are produced around the world every year. The total box office collection of movies has exceeded about 107 billion dollars in the past decade. Movies are an integral part of our lives and we go to the theaters every now and then, be it for a Marvel movie with friends or a romantic one with our partner. We often hear about the box office hits and the billions a movie earns. Reviews by professionals and film enthusiasts are all over the internet after the release of a film. But, have we ever stopped and wondered how all these factors tied in with several others make up a film and its subsequent level of success at the box office? We attempt to analyze various relationships between the influence of a director, a production house, a film’s budget, its box office revenue, and the relative importance of its genre. We also observe movies produced by different countries and how important critics’ and audience ratings are.

The connection between budget and a movie’s box office revenue

This is one of the biggest questions when it comes to success at the box office. Is a movie’s box office gross connected to its budget? The simple answer is: Yes.

We gathered data from 1980 to 2020 of movies’ budgets and gross from the Movie Industry dataset on Kaggle, and this is what we found:

As we can see from the Plot of Budget and Revenue of Movies above, the predictor value, which is the budget, and the response value, which is the gross are correlated. As the budget increases, so does the gross. One of the possible reasons for this is because audiences are willing to spend their money on big films with excellent visual effects. For example, according to the website The Numbers, the most successful big-budget movies are Avengers: Endgame with $400,000,000, Pirates of Caribbean: On Stranger Tides with $379,000,000, and Avengers: Age of Ultron with $365,000,000. Those movies have a worldwide gross of $2,797,800,564, $1,045,713,802, and $1,395,316,979 respectively. These results align well with the output of our plot above.

How do directors influence the success of box office revenue?

As often, the success of a movie’s collection depends on many factors, and one of the most important ones is the director.

From the data that we gathered from 1920 to 2020 from the IMDB Movies Dataset on Kaggle, we randomly selected 16 directors of all time and produced the bar plot between the director and the revenue of movies. Based on this plot, the top-grossing directors are Peter Jackson, Christopher Nolan, Robert Zemeckis, and Irvin Kershner with revenue collections being more than $1,000,000,000, $750,000,000, and $250,000,000 worldwide.

To see how this plot aligns with reality, we will take a deeper look into the two most world-famous and highly-grossing directors: Peter Jackson and Christopher Nolan:

First, world-famous director Peter Jackson is best known as the director of the Lords of the Rings trilogy (2001–2003). His movie, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, won the Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay, with a gross of over $1.1 billion worldwide. Director Christopher Nolan has multiple well-known movies that have won 11 Academy Awards such as The Dark Knight (2008), Inception (2010), Interstellar (2014), and Tenet (2020).

How do movie production companies influence the success of box office revenues?

Besides movies’ budgets and directors, production companies also play a major role in the success of box office revenue. From the data that we gathered from 1920–2020 from the IMDB Movies Dataset on Kaggle, all-time top-grossing production companies are Lucasfilm, Paramount Pictures, Columbia Pictures, IPC Films, and Dovemead Films, with the leading being Lucasfilm, with a gross collection of over 40 billion dollars.

However, according to the website The Numbers, while Paramount Pictures and Columbia Pictures are among the top leading companies worldwide, Lucasfilm is not among the top-ranked production companies. In fact, Universal Pictures and Warner Bros are the top-grossing companies with over 46 billion dollars worldwide box office.

To explain this difference, one possible reason could be that the data that our team gathered ranges over the past 100 years, which could affect the results that we saw as of today.

How does the IMDB score affect the success of box office revenues?

In the 1980s, a movie hadn’t passed the 100 million gross mark unless it had an IMDB score of 5.5, and the only movie to surpass the 500 million gross mark was the highest IMDB score of the set. Similarly in the 1990s’ set of movies, we see a similar trend where movies with very low IMDB scores didn’t perform well at the box office and the only few movies that were exceeding (more than 300 million gross) scored greater than 6.

In the 2000s and 2010s, there was a huge increase in the number of movies made, meaning a lot more data was needed to change the status quo. There are various points within both of these time periods that show that a movie could perform well at the box office but have a fairly average IMDB rating. We believe that this ties in with the emergence of better and more efficient productions in the industry as well as simple inflation. This time period is the first we see of movies making more than 600 million dollars, and even doubling that cap.

A quick side note to be mentioned is that IMDB votes as opposed to the score itself could be a better indicator of how well the movie does. If we run a simple linear regression model on the IMDB votes as opposed to the IMDB score of the movie, we seem to get a better predictor (better R² value) in the votes model.

This model also shows us that having a good score doesn’t equate to having a high grossing movie. Rather it shows the potential of a movie to reach a high gross.

Which genre of movie performs the best at the Oscars?

A trend has been observed in the genres of movies that get the most awards and nominations at the Oscars. Drama has been the most successful one, with famous examples of winners of Best Picture being Forrest Gump (1994), Moonlight (2016), and Nomadland (2020). It is often combined with other genres such as romance. Historicals and Epics with large budgets, production value, and top actors follow with examples of Best Picture winners being Titanic (1997), Gladiator (2000), and The Hurt Locker (2009). Comedies (for example The Artist (2011)) and Musicals (West Side Story (1961) and La La Land (2016) with multiple nominations) come next. Sci-fi, action-adventure, and Western genres come last with the fewest wins and nominations.

Over the years, content-heavy, serious dramas with social problems and inspirational themes have been the most successful along with long war movies. Historical epics which are backed by big production houses and elaborate budgets are also Oscar favorites. Popular “popcorn” movies belonging to the action-adventure, family-oriented, science-fiction, or fantasy genres are rarely nominated or awarded. For example, very few superhero movies have been nominated at the Oscars with recent ones being Black Panther (2018) and The Joker (2019). Even though Spider-Man: No Way Home was the highest grosser of 2021 with a collection of over $1.7 billion worldwide and was even critically acclaimed, it only received an Oscar nomination in the Best Visual Effects category. On the other hand, small independent films are also increasingly being favored in the race to win the award.

Critic’s Review vs Audience’s Review: Which matters more?

Many sites collect and weigh these scores differently, and it poses interesting questions such as what causes these scores to vary, and which one is a better predictor of success. We can take a look at the data from Rotten Tomatoes to get more insight:

When we look at how closely these metrics are aligned, we can observe that there is a weak positive correlation as one would expect, but the large variance present makes one’s score unreliable for predicting the other. We also notice that the films with higher critic ratings have a high probability of being rated NR, or “Not Rated.” This is usually because they are uncut versions of a film that were not submitted for rating. PG-13 and R-rated movies also find themselves on the lower end of the spectrum on critic reviews. The most interesting observations, however, are the vertical lines on either side of the graph, representing movies/shows that received a 100 on one metric but varying scores on the other.

Movies with high audience scores and low critic scores:

There are very few movies with high audience scores and low critic scores, and most of them are dramas. They are also about more controversial or conspiratorial topics, such as religion, ghosts, aliens, sex work, etc. which seem to resonate with audiences but not with critics. It is surprising that some of the least favored movies by critics are dramas since these are generally some of the highest-rated and have the highest chances of winning awards such as the Oscars. It would seem that drama movies have the highest variance in critic scores among genres.

Movies with high critic scores and low audience scores:

On the other hand, there are plenty more movies that are loved by critics but not by audiences, most of them being documentaries, comedies, or horror movies. This is a surprising result, as comedy and horror movies, in particular, are not known for being critically acclaimed, or pandering to critics and are generally targeting the audience.

To see which metric matters more for predicting revenue, we see the ranks of the top 500 movies

in terms of international revenue and plot them according to their audience and critic scores. The critics’ scores are marginally more important than the audiences, but all the best films have a consensus between the audience and critics. Since this is the case, our best metric to predict revenue from scores is not either one of the scores but the difference between them: the closer it comes to 0 (when the reviews are identical) the higher the revenue gets.

In conclusion, the critic reviews do correlate with revenue more than audience reviews do, perhaps because critics are better at gauging the quality of a movie than a few outspoken members of the audience are. What matters most, however, is how much the critic’s opinions diverge from the audiences because minimizing that divergence is what really boosts a movie’s earnings.

Countries with the most Oscar-winning movies:

In the last almost century, all three of the most nominated films for Academy Awards (with fourteen nominations each) came from the United States. Out of the next set of most nominated films, with thirteen nominations each, only Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring came from New Zealand and Shakespeare in Love came from the United Kingdom. The other ten all came from the United States. This data shows that the United States far surpasses other countries in movies with high nominations and high win rates, and the data has not changed drastically recently — in fact, the only two movies on the list from the last decade were La La Land and The Shape of Water, both American movies with ten wins split amongst themselves.

Conclusion:

Overall, the success of box office revenues greatly depends on how much money is spent, how popular the director is, in other words, directors who have received Academy Awards tend to continue making their movies appear more appealing than others. However, as we have observed in the past 3 years, more and more low-budget movies have written their names on the Oscar Awards, for example, Parasite (2019), Jojo Rabbit (2019), or Judy (2019) with a budget of just over $11 million dollars. With that said, the success of movies at the Academy Awards or the box office also depends on unpredictable scripts and their power of storytelling.

Another important feature of the movie-making and selling process are reviewed by multiple parties, be it critics or the audience. While IMDB scores and reviews are all over the internet and synonymous with the success of movies nowadays, it has proven to be a very weak predictor of the success of movies. In the future, a predictor of revenue might simply be how many people are talking about it (IMDB votes).

As for the Oscars, we analyzed what genres may be getting the most attention at the coveted award show. The genre seems to play an important role in analyzing the trends of Oscar Best Picture nominees and winners with Drama being the favorite genre. Big-budget historicals and epics or studio movies with big-name actors have always been favored but small, independent movies in the war, drama, and comedy genres also seem to be increasingly acknowledged.

Even though we have seen foreign movies being increasingly recognized by the Academy, like Parasite in 2019 and Minari in 2020, most films that dominate the Oscars still seem to be American. Out of the top-nominated films for Oscars in the world, over eighty percent of them were from the United States. A reason for this might be the fact that the Oscars are an American award show.

Analyzing different facets of the movies and the industry lets us have an insight into what really gets people talking about it and appreciating it.